Bottom Creek Residents Return To Their Roots

Families Slowly Left Area For Cities

June 15, 1998|By ROBERT FREIS The Roanoke Times

ROANOKE — The isolated mountain community of Bottom Creek dissipated about 50 years ago after the last of its native families moved away.

They left the unrelenting toil of their subsistence farms, migrated to the Roanoke Valley and got industrial jobs at places such as the Norfolk & Western Railway shops and the old American Viscose plant.

And, for the most part, the city is where they still live - although emotionally many residents never left their homeplace.

Their hearts recently led about 200 of them back to this little corner of southeastern Montgomery County for an extended family reunion.

For about a century, Bottom Creek was a small yet lively Southern Appalachian community, a self-sustaining place, which at its heyday contained two stores, a church, a schoolhouse and a number of homes.

These days the site is part of the Nature Conservancy's 1,700-acre Bottom Creek Gorge Preserve. Now it is a habitat of a different kind, and the new green regime has taken a firm hold over the few human vestiges that remain.

At least for one afternoon, Bottom Creek was reborn in a field filled with kinfolk, former neighbors, lawn chairs and folding tables that groaned under picnic food.

People walked around peering at name tags, videotaping the jovial scene and networking with fellow expatriates that ranged in age from babies to 98-year-old Virginia Kreger of Roanoke.

Kreger was born in Bottom Creek, and her memories of cooking cornbread on a wood stove while her husband milked the cow are vivid. Like other residents, they were farmers who raised most of their own provisions and borrowed what they lacked from neighbors. Her departure for Roanoke in 1923 was indicative of Bottom Creek's gradual demise.

``It got too hard to live down here,'' said Millard Collins.

His family hung on until the late 1940s, which was about when Genny Craighead Henderson's family left too. Collins ended up in Portsmouth; Henderson only got as far as the bottom of Bent Mountain.``Where I could still reach out and touch my roots,'' she said.

They stayed in touch throughout the years. Last fall, when Collins hatched the idea of organizing the reunion, he and Henderson became collaborators.

By contacting members of the primary Bottom Creek families - Craighead, Collins, Poff, Hall, Funk and Hurst - they reconstructed a community network. ``It just kept getting bigger and bigger,'' Collins said, referring to both the reunion list and his long distance telephone bill.

Coincidentally, the community's history had drawn the research attention of Jim Crawford of Roanoke. Crawford is an academically trained cultural geographer and vagabond who has sailed the South Pacific, traveled South America and bicycled across America.

With an affinity for working-class people gained by growing up in southeast Roanoke, Crawford volunteered to undertake a cultural study for the conservancy.

He hiked around the abandoned community and befriended natives such as Henderson, who shared her own genealogical research.

Once the reunion was scheduled, Crawford accelerated his work and completed his soft-cover book, ``Bottom Creek - The Cultural Landscape of a Mountain Community,'' only days before the event.

In the book, Crawford recounts the human history of Bottom Creek from Indians to the lives led by many of the people who attended the reunion.

``This is really the story of southwest Virginia in this little community,'' Crawford said. ``Roanoke grew on the backs of people like these. I think it's important for people to know that.''

For its part, the conservancy agreed to allow use of the preserve for the relatively high-impact reunion, which temporarily transformed an open field into a parking lot.

Since 1988, when the conservancy began to acquire land for preserve, natives have been more inclined to visit their old homeplace. Collins, for example, travels across the state monthly to serve as a site caretaker.

``It's given people their home back,'' said Malcolm Black of Bent Mountain, a volunteer preserve monitor.

Melvin Collins of Roanoke took his grandchildren on a walk through the woods to the old family homeplace, long abandoned to the elements. He talked of what it was like to grow up there, raising animals, canning food, cutting firewood.